LocationLine Creek Community Center, Kansas City, MO |
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Artwork by: Ned Smyth
Installed: 2000
Medium: Mosaic
KCMO’s One Percent for the Arts Program
Ned Smyth is an experienced public artist who has completed numerous site specific public art commissions throughout the U.S. Smyth has also exhibited in galleries and museums in the United States and abroad.
For this project, Smyth used a mosaic process with a twist–rather than creating typical colorful mosaic images, he used a dark colored glass to create simple and eloquent line drawings that refer to the history of the region in which Line Creek Community Center stands. There is a man plowing a fields, the head of a hawk, a suburban neighborhood, a Native American portrait (turned upside down), a giant rabbit, a cowboy, and other historical images. The artist states “I don’t intend to make political comment, I am using a process of drawing and, as might occur in my sketchbook, sometimes the images appear turned around.”
Nearly 200 hundred years after the area’s first fur trading post was settled on the bluffs of the Missouri River, Kansas City is preparing to honor the French pioneer Francois Chouteau who established it, and the Native Americans with whom he traded. Francois Chouteau...
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